Ecommerce has become the face of businesses in the 21st century. We are already into an age where if you don’t have an ecommerce website for your product, then you are already behind competition. But, there are thousands of eCommerce websites selling similar products. How can we outperform the business on the other end of the street?
Well, the answer to this question is fairly simple. It is the study of the eCommerce analytics and decisions taken thereafter that makes you beat the competition. eCommerce analytics are of various types, in this blog we are going to explore a little about what types of eCommerce analytics are available, and how they are useful in winning the SEO game.
Types of eCommerce Analytics:
1. Audience:
Understanding who your audience is is a crucial part of the eCommerce game. You need to collect as much information as you can about your target audience. Like their location, age, gender, the kind of device they are using, etc.
All this data helps an eCommerce business optimize and invest better in marketing campaigns, and the development of their products that appeal to the aimed audience.
2. Acquisition
Acquisition is nothing but understanding that from where has the visitor come into your site. Is it
- A direct link,
- Email campaign,
- Social media, or
- Direct search.
This helps you to focus your efforts more on the most lucrative marketing tool for your business and thus win more customers.
3. Behavior
Customer behavior is an extremely important analytic to understand, why? Well, it helps you figure out what is working on your site and what is not.
- Which pages are most visited by a consumer when he/ she logs into your site?
- What product is the most viewed, but not as much sold?
- What is the average time a consumer remains and explores your landing page?
- Which CTAs are working, and which are not.
All this data helps you improve your online store to make it better and more effective over time, thus ramping up sales.
4. Conversion Analytics
This can also be put as a subcategory of consumer behavior. Conversion analytics is the effort to analyze when, and how a visitor gets converted into an actual paid customer.
This includes multiple factors like how long it takes for a consumer to actually press the buy now button, or how many visits on average it takes for a consumer to buy your product. All of this data can be leveraged into creating a more effective site.
5. Paid Ad Analytics
This is important when it comes to running ads, for example you are running ads on instagram, so you need it to generate as much ROI as possible. How much are you spending on ads, and how much revenue are you generating against those ads, is the value positive? Or is it negative?
What is your CPC (cost-per-click)? All this can help you reduce your ad spend over time and thus win the paid ads game against your competitors.
Perks Of Ecommerce Analytics, And How To Exploit Them?
1. Marketing Analysis
So, by now it is pretty evident why we are looking at analytics. In a single sentence we can say that we analyze all this data to “Increase Sales”. Increase in sales is a direct result of marketing optimization.
Finding out what works, and what doesn’t. Especially which channels are generating higher revenue for your business. The channels that are not generating a good response should either be optimized, or be omitted to cut down marketing spens.
It is seen that an average eCommerce company spends about 30% of their annual revenue as customer acquisition cost, that is huge, and it needs to be used in an intelligent way in order to target the right people.
2. Trend Analysis
The understanding of data leads to a good analysis of future trends and patterns that your visitors are likely to follow. This enables you to preplan your content creation strategy and grab the early bird advantage.
The faster you target a particular keyword on Google the faster it will rank due to the lack of content for that keyword.
Tremendous advantage is gained by preplaning ad campaigns for both on offline and online channels. If you are the one starting/ very early on the trend you’ll definitely gain a lot of traction on your eCommerce store, and social media.
3. Optimizing Pricing
By analyzing the data collected from your eCommerce site, you can easily understand which products are overpriced, or underpriced. For example if visitors are cooking back to a page again and again, look at the product, but are existing without making a purchase, it means that that product is overpriced.
By running a timed sale on the website, you can make instant sales to those people who are interested but the product does not fit their budget.
4. Personalization
eCommerce insights can be extremely helpful in order for you to understand and make better decisions about product placement. A level of personalization to your target demographics will increase your sales substantially and make the experience for the person better.
Like recommendations made on Amazon are personalized to fit that particular person. A person interested in cosmetics will only see cosmetics and related products on their home screen. Whereas, a person who browses and purchases car spare parts, will see likewise related products on their home screen.
This makes the customer window shop more effectively, and if they like something they go for a purchase. It increases the chances of making a sale exponentially.
Important Steps That One Should Follow
There are steps that need to be taken in order for the no.s on your screen to turn to no.s in your bank account and we have listed some of those down below:
1. Compile
You need to compile and consolidate all the different data from various places, where you are shown insights like:
- Your eCommerce store
- Email providers
- Customer relationship management platforms
- Google Analytics Enhanced ecommerce data
- Outbrain
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
All this data can be imported directly into any spreadsheet software like MS Excel, or Google Sheets and can be analyzed from there onwards.
2. Connect The Various Data Points
You have to sit with some time in your hand and interconnect the no.s on the spreadsheet with your real customers. You will start to see the entire picture within a few hours of analyzing. Without proper analysis and manual understanding of this data, you won’t go very far.
Remember that the final business/ marketing decisions are taken by humans working in your firm, and not computers.
3. Change Is The Only Constant
You need to keep changing the look and feel of your website with the seasons. For example during new year’s you can give your store a more festive vibe whereas, during the 4th of July, you can make it more patriotic in nature with the appropriate theme colors.
Also, use your data in order to figure out what changes are pushing conversions better, and faster. This will give you a solid formula to follow every year.
4. Keep An Eye On Customer Behavior
Analyze what products are sold when, which time of day, though which channel, and which time of the year, and by whom. The answer to all these questions will give you an idea of what to market when and to whom.
Closing Thoughts
The bottom line is that analytics is a powerful tool that when used can turn into a medium of exponential success and growth. Intelligent business decisions that are made based on this data will change how your online store does business forever.
eCommerce analytics is the key to beating the competition in your industry once and for all. Do it before someone else gets to this article and implements it.
